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On Sunday, July 5, Paul Krugamn laid out his argument that affordable health care for everyone was an achievable goal.[quote] Many people would be surprised to learn that I agree with him on that. He correctly argues that we already cover the bulk of the most expensive health care patients by covering the elderly under Medicare. He also argues that the uninsured already receive much care that we are already paying for so we are already paying much of the costs for their care. Finally he argues (as a corollary to the first point) that many of the uninsured are generally young and healthy so that insuring them would cost less per person than our current per-person cost of public insurance (bringing down the average cost per person and increasing the overall cost only slightly).
His conclusion is that “extending coverage to most or all of the 45 million people in America without health insurance — should, in the end, add only a few percent to our overall national health bill.” He would be right at the beginning but eventually the nightmare spiral of skyrocketing costs would take over because the fundamental problem in our health care system would not be addressed – overuse and the disconnect between the source of payment and the subject of care.